E-Textiles Intelligent Clothing, Wearables and non-wearables

E-Textiles are textiles (garments, but also non-wearables such as carpets or curtains) that sense and respond to environmental stimuli. This is achieved by integrating electronic and digital components in the textile, which is done in a variety of ways. At one extreme, textiles can simply act as a substrate where electronic components such as sensors, actuators and microcontrollers are attached. On the other extreme, sensors and output devices can be integrated directly in the fibers of the textile. For example, mixing conductive and non-conductive fibers can be mixed in order to produce stretch sensors and pressure sensors.

One of the challenges e-Textiles face is related to their robustness. An e-Textile might be exposed to high degrees of tensile strain depending on the substrate of the textile and the position on the body where it is worn. The e-Textile should be robust not to break due to tensile strain, while at the same time preserving desirable textile properties such as flexibility, softness and lightness. Washability is another challenge, surprisingly not because of water or high temperatures, but because of the stress e-Textiles are exposed to during a washing program. Furthermore, there is a high demand for solutions on energy harvesting and storage because traditional batteries often used in e-Textiles are hard, bulky, heavy and cannot be fully integrated in the e-Textile. The development of software for e-Textiles is challenging due to different reasons. e-Textiles usually have limited resources such as memory, CPU and energy. Therefore, software running on the e-Textile (sometimes complex machine learning algorithms) should make use of these resources sparingly. One of the highest potentials of e-Textiles is on extracting high-level information about the user’s context (user activity, health status, performance during exercising) from sensor data. This requires complex data mining and classification algorithms and might be even more challenging due to sensor displacement caused by draping and sliding of the textile and to noise in the sensor data caused by variations in conductance of textile sensors.

Our research interests include enabling and supporting the development of software for e-Textiles. We have built an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for e-Textiles called “TangoHapps” and “Inteteractex”. The environment is used to visually program applications for e-Textiles and supports every hardware element from the Arduino Lilypad family. Software developed with the environment is then uploaded wirelessly to a microcontroller attached to the e-Textile. We have demonstrated how the environment can be used for the creation of a smart jacket that plays music when it detects the wearer is running and makes an emergency call when it detects the wearer is lying down on the ground in the SE 2015 Conference in Dresden. We were recorded by the press during the conference. The video can be found here: http://youtu.be/9cC9xCfqayY . Application areas we work on include disability and rehabilitation. We created a smart hat for blind navigation. The hat has eight vibration motors and vibrates in the direction blind users should take. Additionally, we developed and evaluated a smart bandage for rehabilitation of knee injuries. The bandage uses motion sensors in order to track the performance and quality of different rehabilitation exercises performed by patients. Besides giving feedback and enabling patients and doctors to track the progress of the rehabilitation, the bandage has the potential to elicit information about the injury and the most appropriate treatment for each patient.

A Development Environment for e-Textile End Users - eTextIDE Software Campus (BMBF)

Universität der Künste Mobile Contextual Computing Siemens CT

Theses Offered

Masterthesis

Assembly of a 9-axis IMU recording device

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Date

26.02.2018

If you have experience on hardware design, you are welcome to apply to this project! We are looking for a device able to record acceleration, angular velocity and magnetic fields (9-axis) at high speeds on an SD card. We currently have a device able to do so based on InvenSense's ICM20602 and uses an external magnetometer. The goal of this thesis is to adapt / extend or assemble a new device using on the most modern Invensense's MPU9250 IMU (or similar to be agreed on).

Masterthesis

Wearable Activity Recognition

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Date

03.03.2018

My field of research is on machine learning with wearable sensors. One possible application field is sports (e.g. counting the amount of repetitions of an exercise, measuring athlete’s performance), another is veterinary medicine (activity recognition for animal: eating, walking, resting). If you have access to a specific animal or perform a specific sport and want to automatically extract context information, we could work on it together. Feel free to contact me with your idea.

We are developing a virtual coach for goalkeeper training with a famous German goalkeeper. We have a wearable device with an integrated 9-axis IMU (accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer). The goal of this thesis is to develop a firmware (in plain C) that performs computations (e.g. mean, correlation, fast fourier transform) on the wearable device and sends the results over to an iOS application. Our wearable device is based on InvenSense's ICM20602 and uses an external magnetometer.

Created a bandage for rehabilitation of knee injuries with pressure sensors and algorithms for measuring performance of one-leg hops and side hops.

Masterthesis

A Framework for the Rapid Development of E-Textiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Mertcan Yigin

Date

15.10.2015

Created a tool for text-based programming of software for e-Textiles.

Masterthesis

Integrating Usage Feedback into an IDE for E-Textiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Magued Farah

Date

15.08.2015

Identified different designs to make an e-Textile provide output to a user (wearer or other individuals around the wearer) and integrated it in Interactex.

Bachelor Thesis

A Testbed for the Comparison of Algorithms for Rehabilitation Exercises

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Lukas Welte

Date

15.07.2015

Created a testbed to support developers in the creation of software for e-Textiles by automatically finding the proper algorithm parameters.

Masterthesis

Improvement of the functionality and usability of TangoHapps: a development environment for eTextiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Nazmus Shaon

Date

15.04.2014

Redesigned, added unit tests and evaluated the Interactex development environment for eTextiles.

Masterthesis

A Framework for Dynamic Gesture Management Using Smart Rings

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Natalia Zarawska

Date

15.01.2015

A smart ring and iPad App to control a smart environment (plugs, blinds, lamps). The ring would learn from the gestures performed by the user.

Masterthesis

Patterns for the development of rehabilitation exercises with eTextiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Blagina Simeonova

Date

15.09.2014

Identified patterns of movements that are usually performed by patients in the field of rehabilitation and described ways to realize them using wearables.

Bachelorthesis

Implementation of a Framework for Real-Time Information Sharing on the Internet of Things

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Robert Weindl

Date

14.08.2014

Implemented a framework based on the MQTT communication protocol to enable cyber-physical systems including wearable devices to communicate and share data over a back end server with regard to privacy concerns. Demonstrated it with a T-Shirt able to measure pulse from the user’s ears.

Bachelorthesis

Interactive control of computer applications with user-defined gestures

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Tobias Kammerer

Date

15.08.2014

A smart ring with an integrated IMU, which learned the gestures performed by users. It enabled users to map actions to each gesture such as inputting text into a computer device, or turning on and off the music.

Bachelorthesis

Recording and classification of gestures in a visual programming environment

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Michael Conrads

Date

14.08.2014

Added functionality to the Interactex environment to classify data (such as gestures performed by users) and trigger actions when event or gesture occurred. Demonstrated the idea with a smart glove with flexion sensors.

Bachelorthesis

A Visual Programming Approach for Reusing Solutions to Commonly Occurring Problems in the Context of Smart Clothing

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Timm Beckmann

Date

15.10.2014

A solution to reusing functionality in the development of eTextiles by hierarchically aggregating lower level functionality components in the Interactex environment. Demonstrated the idea with a smart glove with flexion sensors.

Masterthesis

An IDE for the rapid development of algorithms for smart textiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Agon Lohaj

Date

15.03.2016

Identified functionality needed for the development of eTextiles and wearable devices and developed an IDE to for the visual programming of smart textiles.

Masterthesis

A visual programming environment for medical eTextile applications

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Güven Candogan

Date

15.09.2015

Added support in the Interactex IDE for mining information out of sensor data. The IDE now supports the development of the KneeHapp bandage.

Bachelorthesis

A Visual Programming Paradigm for eTexiles

Advisor

Juan Haladjian

Author

Aaron Pérez Martín

Date

15.07.2015

Development of a new visual programming paradigm in the Interactex IDE.

Publications

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